u/Ill_Nectarine_5945

Hi everyone, this may be a long and convoluted post but I’ll try my best to make the most sense.

I (26F) have been working at my current employer/company for almost four years now. My boyfriend (30M) started working there around 8 months prior to me starting. For the first few months, we didn’t interact, because I was in a relationship at the time and he was very “in his own bubble” if that makes any sense. But my relationship fizzled out, and shortly after that we started talking just in general. The about a month goes by and we start actually seeing one another, and it’s great. First six months are awesome, I got a consistent weekly scheduled job for awhile, and he did as well in another department. Then I went onto his shift, and is where things started to get “bad” imo. During that time, the department itself was having issues with machinery in general, but as well as a high job turnover, so there was lots of training going on, even though he had only been in his job a few months, he took on the lead role for our shift, because no one else wanted the job. During that time, I was training to learn how to do my job, as well as training other people, and doing his job when he wasn’t there (we operated 7 days a week at the time, I was SMTFS, he was M-F), so I was admitted very stressed out. He could see that, and we would often get into arguments about me not being calm/not knowing what to do, which would just end with me silently getting upset at myself.

After around a year, pretty much my dream job came up in a different department, so I took it. Little did I know that that department had become such a toxic environment inter-personality wise, I stuck that out for a year and a half, just trying to come in everyday and do the best I could, but spending every evening alone after a draining 10 hours and not being able to see him at all really took a toll on my mental heath and wellbeing. So fast forward to now, in May there was a job posted to go back into his department, on his shift. And I asked him, point blank: “would you rather me or (insert name of other girl we work with who applied for it) in the room ? I’m not asking as your girlfriend, I’m asking as your coworker. Who do you think will be a good fit for the shift, me or her ? I need you to be honest.” And he said, “You.”

So I took the job. I’m back in the same department as before, but things have changed, but not for the better. Everyone I’m working with now has been working in there the entire time since I had left for the other room, so they all have more experience than I do, and at this point it feels like my boyfriend wants me to know that. Every day I go into work and try to do my best but I just get relegated to doing paperwork or doing mundane tasks like watching something and waiting for something to happen. For context, in the job I have, there’s about 5-10 different things I could be doing in the run of a day, but I’m only doing 2-3 because everyone else is doing all the other things, and my boyfriend does the things with them and won’t let me do the things “because they earned it”. It just makes me feel like I don’t deserve to have the job anymore and that I’m not as good of a worker as I thought I was, so I constantly find myself second guessing my decisions, so I ask him questions, because I don’t want to seem stupid to our other colleagues, but every time I open my mouth it feels like he has a problem with it.

It also doesn’t help that everyone on the shift communicates all throughout the day but no one dares to speak to me for some reason, as if they think that he’ll talk to me because he’s my boyfriend so they don’t bother, but then he never talks to me at work, unless he needs me to do something. It just feels like everything has changed from when I first began working there, both in terms of my relationship and just overall feeling about the job itself, and I don’t know what to do. He also said my body language is terrible at work, but a lot of the reason my body language is poor is because I’m not doing anything, or I’m standing around waiting for something to go off, or everyone is already doing everything so I’m just standing there like a child, I feel useless in there. There’s always been a phrase used at our workplace: “sometimes we just need a body”, I feel like I’ve become that body.

I have considered going back to school (dropped out of university after bad mental health issues), but with the state of the world right now it seems impossible, because I’d need money in order to go to school, and I can’t leave work and expect him to provide for both of us. This is also the only real job I’ve had besides working part time in a supermarket in high school/uni, and it has amazing benefits/pension, so it’s daunting to think about leaving to pursue something else.

The reason why I say I want to leave the job is because I truly do love my boyfriend, he has all the same interests as me, ticks all of my boxes, there’s no issue with my boyfriend, it’s the fact that our lives are so intertwined, and he’s said that he’s able to separate work and home, but I don’t think I can. I’ve really tried, I’ve tried suppressing my emotions and greyrocking, discussing it with my therapist, even discussing it with other people who are in relationships at work (there’s at least 5 relationships within my workplace, and they all seem to be doing well), but it just doesn’t seem to do anything, I still end up feeling like “damn, he’s letting someone else do YZ and I’m stuck doing X”, as if I’m doing something wrong to not be able to do it with him.

TLDR: I used to like working with my boyfriend but now it feels like he’s not even my boyfriend anymore.